Where does irritability and anger come from?
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Everyone seems to have their own reasons for being angry and irritated - illness, nerves, intolerant behavior of others.
However, the Monk Ambrose was convinced that the true cause of irritability and anger is always pride.
Receiving anger
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But there is another anger. Remember the Gospel story about how Christ wanted to treat a withered arm. It was on Saturday. The Savior came to the synagogue and the Pharisees also appeared there, wanting to catch him violating the Sabbath rule. What does the Apostle Mark tell us about this? “And he looked at them with anger, grieving over the hardness of their hearts, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” (Mark 3:5). The Apostle Mark speaks of another type of anger—the receiving one. Here the indignation and indignation of Christ (sorrowing with anger) is the receiving form of anger, because He grieves for them, He wants good for them.
Or another example.
I see that my grandson is doing something that I cannot tolerate. Then I say: “Well, what are you doing? You offended grandma! Apologize now!”
Please note that I can speak very intensely, harshly and even passionately. And he will not be offended by me, because he sees that I want the best for him. I want to help him be better and not harm others. And this will be a form of accepting anger, because what is meant here is not the dissolution of the relationship, but, on the contrary, the desire for its improvement, and therefore this is in no way a sin.
How to get rid of irritability and anger?
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Reverend Leo urged people to restrain irritation in themselves for the sake of maintaining peace of mind. The elder noted that irritability cannot be fought with solitude. To do this, you need to spend as much time as possible with loved ones.
The Monk Macarius warned that fighting these feelings requires not only a lot of time, but also labor. Only with God's help can these feelings be eradicated. He believed that it would be impossible to avoid events that provoke anger in life. But we must resist it through humility. Macarius instructed that a believer should restrain himself from swear words when he experiences indignation in his soul. Reproach yourself for not being able to maintain peace of mind. Only in this case will passions be gradually eradicated.
The Monk Zosima emphasized that when, when insulted, a person worries not about being insulted, but because he was insulted, the demons are most afraid of this, because they understand that the person is confronting his passions, they are unable to do anything about it do.
If a person was unexpectedly curbed by anger, St. Joseph gave advice on how to deal with it. According to him, it was necessary to take Epiphany water as quickly as possible, make the sign of the cross, drink a sip and wet your chest with holy water.
I can stand you. How we use anger to hide from pain and why it doesn’t help
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.
On the website of the magazine “Thomas” there has been a permanent column “Question to the Priest” for a long time. Each reader can ask his own question to receive a personal answer from the priest. But some of the questions cannot be answered in one letter - they require a detailed conversation. Recently a letter came to the section asking how to manage anger. Psychologist Alexander Tkachenko answers the reader's question .
Alexander TKACHENKO
There are two dangerous extremes in our relationship with our own anger. The first is the desire to constantly suppress the aggression that has already arisen in oneself. The second is to show this aggression for any reason, as soon as even slight irritation arises in your soul.
Psychologist Alexander Tkachenko answers a reader’s question
Both of these approaches, despite the formal opposition, lead to the same result: the person practicing them is in a state of anger every day and for a long time. True, in one case it is expressed in behavior, in the other it is hidden from prying eyes. But, alas, if horseradish is sweeter than radish, it is not much sweeter. The second option, in a spiritual and psychological sense, is not much different for the better from the first.
With a hot-tempered person, everything is more or less clear: he got angry over a trifle, responded sharply, raised his voice, said unpleasant things, offended his interlocutor. With this behavior, social connections are disrupted, relationships deteriorate, the social circle is sharply narrowed to the point of complete loneliness.
But constantly suppressed anger can also cause a lot of trouble both to the person himself and to the people around him. The fact is that anger that arises in the soul is a very strong emotion. The psyche spends a lot of energy to suppress it. And if flaring anger is suppressed all the time, then at some point these forces will definitely end, because they are not infinite. Plus, suppressed anger has an insidious property - it has the ability to accumulate, summing up the irritation from all the cases when it was not given an outlet. Sooner or later, this accumulated anger becomes stronger than the mental mechanisms that suppress it. This can be compared to the destruction of a dam that could not withstand the pressure of water that rose sharply during the flood. As a result, a restrained, well-mannered, law-abiding citizen can suddenly, out of the blue, unleash his rage on a clumsy fellow traveler on public transport, on a sluggish cashier in a store, on teenagers talking loudly.
A hot-tempered person constantly makes scandals, giving vent to his anger.
A person with repressed anger is like a bomb with a delay mechanism set for an indefinite period.
However, even if this suppressed anger did not break free, the situation still remains threatening. The charge of irritation continues to accumulate, and the bomb will sooner or later explode. Only in this case, the energy of the “explosion” will no longer go into external space, but inside the person himself, affecting his physical health.
Another very common and completely ineffective way of dealing with your own anger is to redirect it to another object.
Here you can consider a whole range of different options. First of all, this is the familiar venting of anger at others. For example, when anger was caused by the behavior of a rude boss, but there was not enough courage to adequately respond to his rudeness. As a result, this temporarily suppressed anger spills out, for example, at home on innocent relatives or on one’s own subordinates, if any. There is probably no need to give a moral assessment to this method of “fighting anger.” Taking out an indignant soul on people who love or depend on you, knowing in advance that everything will be forgiven, is an ugly thing, but not uncommon, alas.
However, there are other schemes for reversing anger that are much more unexpected. It also happens that a person redirects anger from the offender to... himself. This is also a state known to everyone, in which you begin to internally scold yourself with the last words for indecisiveness, weakness of will, stupidity, cowardice, awkwardness and other qualities “worthy” of such scolding. By the way, some religious people are more susceptible to a similar type of anger than others, strictly forbidding themselves to be angry with others, but at the same time capable of experiencing strong anger towards themselves and slowly getting used to blaming, reproaching and insulting themselves for real or fictitious sins.
Unfortunately, even people who are very scrupulous in matters of morality are not always able to see the fundamental difference between the ability to take responsibility for their mistakes and the painful desire to be so “piously” angry, scolding themselves in their souls for all they are worth. From a psychological point of view, such an attitude towards oneself is very destructive and does not improve health in any way. And in a spiritual sense, anger redirected towards oneself is no different from anger at one’s neighbor.
From creation, it is human nature not to be angry with oneself, but to love oneself, this is our normal attitude towards the gift received from God - towards our soul, body, towards our abilities and talents. The holy prophet and king psalmist David, delighted with the contemplation of his own human nature, extols praise to the Lord: I praise you, because I am wonderfully made (Ps 139:14). But sin, which destroys and kills this gift in us, really should be hated. It is with him that one should be angry, as the holy fathers and Christ Himself did. But at the same time, continue to love yourself, despite all your sinful infirmities. According to the commandment, you need to treat your neighbor as yourself, which means you also need to love yourself, force yourself to this love, even if you see some sinful weaknesses and imperfections in yourself. The Monk Seraphim of Sarov spoke about such compulsion and the inadmissibility of anger against oneself: “We must bear with our soul in its weaknesses and imperfections and tolerate our shortcomings, as we tolerate others, but not become lazy, but encourage ourselves to do better. Whether you consumed a lot of food, or did something else similar, akin to human weakness, do not be indignant at this and do not cause harm to harm, but courageously push yourself to correct, and meanwhile try to maintain peace of mind.”
Taking out anger on substitute objects does not reduce, but increases the likelihood of aggression towards people.
Animals can also become the focus of redirected anger. Yelling at a cat or kicking a dog that has turned up at the wrong time is usually also aggression, which was originally intended not for pets, but for someone else. But the strangest case of this kind is the displacement of anger towards inanimate objects. Thus, the Monk Cassian John the Roman, a Christian ascetic who lived in the 4th century, wrote about himself: “I remember how, living in the desert, I sometimes got angry at a writing cane if I didn’t like its thickness or thinness, sometimes at a knife if when you cut with it, it became dull and did not cut quickly - sometimes on a flint, if a spark of fire did not quickly fly out of it when you were in a hurry to read; and at the same time a movement of indignation sometimes invaded such that a curse against the soulless thing involuntarily burst from the lips.” Modern life also constantly provides convincing evidence that the arrows of anger can automatically be transferred from people to inanimate objects. Football fans destroy stadium seats in rage. Angry over an unpleasant telephone conversation, a man throws his cell phone on the asphalt. In the midst of a family scandal, a woman begins breaking dishes in the kitchen. It would seem that in a certain sense this is even useful: otherwise, it would not be plates and telephones that would be broken, but other people’s heads. But, alas, practice shows that redirecting anger to substitute objects does not reduce, but on the contrary, increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior towards people.
Several decades ago in Japan, methods began to be actively introduced into corporate practice to relieve accumulated aggression. Mannequins were installed in office buildings, onto which one could paste a printed portrait of the boss and beat the resulting dummy without risking being thrown out of work. Stores began to sell special notebooks, the only purpose of which was to tear the pages to shreds when anger rises in the throat. Even entire “therapeutic” rooms appeared with furniture that, for a reasonable fee, could be smashed to smithereens with a sledgehammer. The result was not long in coming. After the introduction of these measures, the statistics of cardiovascular diseases among office workers went down sharply. It would seem that the ideal remedy for dealing with anger has been found. All over the world, psychologists began to recommend that clients kick a sofa pillow with their fists as a way to respond to the emotion of anger. But suddenly, after serious research, it turned out that after beating substitute objects, the level of aggression in an angry person does not decrease, but, on the contrary, becomes even higher. In addition, after such exercises, a motor skill is added to the feeling of anger - to express it by hitting the “offender”. After a number of sad cases when a person relieved aggression by hitting a pillow, and then went and hit the person he hated in the same way, this practice was recognized as dangerous in the professional community of psychologists and abandoned.
So what happened to anger during such exercises? Figuratively speaking, the person allowed the spring compressed inside him to straighten out, discharged that very “bomb with a delay mechanism” and thanks to this avoided the psychosomatic consequences of suppressed anger. This gave a real healing effect, recorded by medical statistics. The release of anger through aggressive forms of behavior really relieved the internal conflict in the psyche between anger and the efforts to restrain it. But it also turned out that the overall level of a person’s anger does not decrease, but on the contrary, it is only fueled, increasing the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the future. Anger, constantly directed at a substitute object, like the flame of a fire into which more and more armfuls of brushwood are thrown, can then spread to people.
Thus, modern psychology, through trial and error, came to the rule that was formulated by the righteous saint John of Kronstadt: “Don’t be angry with soulless things and don’t scold them when they don’t work out the way they should, and become a hindrance to you in your work. If you get used to being angry at things, you will become angry with people, even without reason, and you will fall away from love, and love is the essence of the entire Law of God.”
To the question “how to deal with anger correctly?” Christian asceticism and modern psychology give the same paradoxical answer: in order to overcome your anger, you need to learn to experience your pain.
It would seem that what is common between anger and pain? However, there is a connection between them, and a very direct one. The fact is that anger is not a conscious feeling, but just an emotional reaction to a threat to our safety. Initially, anger was implanted by God into human nature as a means of protection from the devil and from sinful thoughts. It was against them that man was called to use this spiritual sword - anger. Man had no other enemies before the Fall. But instead of anger, Satan's offer to try the forbidden fruit aroused interest and sympathy among the first people. Further events are known to everyone who has read the Bible. Anger as a spiritual weapon remained with man even after he fell away from God. But now people are using this sword against each other with all their might, snatching it as soon as it seems to them that someone is threatening their safety. And such a threat is signaled precisely by mental pain from other people’s actions, words, or even our very assumptions about other people’s unfriendly intentions. And it doesn’t matter whether the threat is real or imaginary. In any case, the emotional pain from it seems so unbearable to a person that he strives to cut it off from himself as quickly as possible. And then the sword of wrath flashes in the air.
By the way, in the case of physical pain something similar often happens. For example, the now textbook situation is when a person, while hammering a nail, accidentally hits his finger with a hammer. How does he feel about this? Right. First - pain, then - intense anger. Well, it’s better not to quote what words he can say in this state. However, the end result is known to everyone who has at least once hit their nail instead of the head of a nail: they jumped on one leg, cursed, growled, bared their teeth - and it seemed to feel better.
From a psychological point of view, anger is one of the ways to interrupt emotional pain. It may have a thousand different reasons, but the essence of its relationship with anger does not change in any way.
The path to victory over anger begins with the ability to stop it at its inception.
Anger can flare up very quickly, but if you try to describe its development in stages, you get the following picture:
1) we perceive something as a threat, 2) the threat causes emotional pain, 3) there is a fear that this pain will be unbearable, 4) out of fear that this pain will destroy us, we interrupt it with anger.
And only then can we release this anger, which has already arisen, outward, redirect it to substitute objects, suppress it with an effort of will, turn it on ourselves, or do something else with it. But, since flaring anger is a very strong emotion, any methods of dealing with it require a lot of energy and often give very dubious results. Therefore, the most effective way to defeat anger is to stop it at the stage of its occurrence.
You can learn to notice your emotional pain in conflict situations and not be afraid to go into it, try to live with it, feel it, without interrupting this pain with anger. And if a person decides to do this, then a small miracle happens: suddenly it turns out that you can live with this pain, that you are quite capable of coping with it without any anger. Yes, your soul will ache for a while. But even a single experience of overcoming this pain will subsequently become a powerful resource for combating one’s own anger. St. Basil the Great wrote about this method of curbing anger through patience with emotional suffering back in the 4th century: “...Let his (the offender’s) words be an exercise in wisdom for you. If they don't touch you, it means you're invulnerable. And even if a few souls suffer, keep the regrettable within yourself. For it is said: within me my heart is troubled (Ps 142:4), that is, the passion did not appear outward, but was pacified, like a wave breaking on the shore.”
This very “keep the regrettable within yourself” is the beginning on which the Christian virtue of patience relies. Living your pain, not hiding from it behind anger and rage, but, on the contrary, making it a part of your life, and introducing it, already processed and defeated, into your emotional experience - only in this way can you get out of the captivity of your own anger to the freedom of a virtuous life in Christ.
If we offended someone
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This is unacceptable for a believer, so Elder Leo called for making peace with the person who had suffered the offense as quickly as possible. He noted that it is better to admit that he is guilty than to become a victim of a lengthy lawsuit.
Of course, this is not easy to do if the anger is not unfounded. In this case, a person is able to become angry even with the closest person if he has committed an unworthy act. However, it is necessary to restrain anger even in this situation, since evil is never eradicated or corrected by retaliatory evil. Only love can defeat him.
Elder Leo directly wrote to his child, who was angry with his brother, that such an act should not be tolerated. Rage directed at another person fills us with passion. Therefore, humility is required, awareness of one’s insignificance and weakness.
Unbridled anger is a soul-destroying emotion.
Showing anger is considered a sin and is spoken of in the New Testament. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for the anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God.”
The words from the Epistle of the Apostle James have not lost their meaning today. Anger is a vice caused by pride, pushing for revenge. People and states, in a fit of revenge, are moving towards self-destruction.
We need to learn to hear each other and forgive insults. An angry feeling is appropriate towards people who break the law and abuse their position. In case of danger, every person is obliged to protect himself, his family, and his country. But he should not succumb to the desire for revenge, uncontrolled violence, and cruelty.
Advice. Holy water helps a lot with anger, drink it as often as possible and go to confession in Church!
In everyday life situations, a Christian must learn to deal with irritation. This promotes spiritual development and helps destroy evil. Anger and anger kill everything good around. By being angry, a Christian does not give himself pleasure; he instills a reciprocal feeling of hatred or pain in the soul of the offended.
If someone offended us
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Elder Macarius emphasized that not a single offender is able to offend a person without God’s permission. Therefore, it should be considered an instrument of God's Providence. Therefore, he should not be insolent, but realize that in this way the Lord demonstrates to us his own dispensation.
The Monk Joseph argued that offenders should be considered our spiritual benefactors, since they awaken a person from spiritual sleep. He even considered it useful to be offended from time to time, since they push us to evaluate ourselves and not to stagnate in our spiritual perception of the world.
When, after being offended, a person cannot come to his senses for a long time and find peace of mind, Elder Ambrose recommended remembering one’s own mistakes and unrighteous deeds. One day, one sister asked the monk how one could not be sincerely indignant at injustice and insults. Ambrose told her that she should start by being patient with the troubles that come along the way. If a person himself does not offend anyone and treats others fairly, then it will become easier for him to learn patience.
Rejecting anger
Hieronymus Bosch "Anger";
fragment of a tabletop, 1475-1480. – In general, what do we mean when we talk about anger?
– You see, in everyday language the word “anger” essentially does not exist. Well, we don’t say: “I’m angry!”, or “Are you angry, dear?” But when we see that, for example, a child has clenched his fists, is flushed, and is bursting with color... What are we asking? We are saying exactly what Princess Marya, who had already become Countess Rostova, said in Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace,” trying to sort out misunderstandings with her husband. She said to Nikolai: “Are you angry?” This is such a humanistic context, you know? She is not quick to judge the child, but turns him to what he feels.
We use the verbs “angry”, “angry”, “indignant”, “indignant” in speech and they best describe what we mean by anger.
Indeed, there is no need to hide the fact that you are angry, because this is, at a minimum, hypocrisy.
There is no need to hide that you are angry, because this will inevitably lead to hypertension, bile duct dyskinesia or some other ailment. Another thing is to clearly understand why and what exactly happens to us when we experience anger. Let's figure it out.
Tatiana Gavrilova. Photo: Pavel Smertin
If we think like Orthodox Christians, then by anger we understand sin, which leads us away from Love and sows enmity around us. Anger that fundamentally rejects the other as an object of love is destructive. It destroys relationships:
the one with whom I am angry, splash out my hostility and irritation, my hatred and indignation, in fact, turns out to be rejected by me. This is the kind of anger I call rejecting.
It comes in different intensities. The strength of rejecting anger depends not only on temperament, but on the significance of the situation that causes anger.
But anger does not necessarily destroy the person himself. It can be reduced, it can flare up or go out. For example, phlegmatic people are generally not characterized by brightness and variety of emotions. And for a choleric person, if he is hurt, the flow of emotions can be extremely intense.
Rejecting anger comes in at least three forms: irritation, anger, and rage. Of the three forms, the mildest is irritation. We must keep in mind that irritation and irritability are not the same thing. Frustration is a weaker and less offensive form of dismissive anger than the others, but it also hurts. No matter how hard you try, you won't fool anyone when you're annoyed because it shows.
Irritability is a symptom of a disease (an indirect sign of the presence of asthenia, neurasthenia, intestinal diseases), that is, a sign of physical ill health.
Reasons for anger
Unfair treatment in a given situation, as a rule, causes a response that changes the attitude towards the offender. An employer, spouse, children, neighbors can cause offense by reacting unfairly to any actions or words. The result is angry emotions and the desire to prove, punish, judge, change, and these are all the functions of God.
Gossip, slander, various types of condemnation and too high an opinion of oneself often lead to discord, causing an argument, quarrel or retaliatory gossip. Lacking patience and humility, Christians often fall into an angry state, especially if in some situation someone stands in the way of achieving what they want. Without the patience to wait for change, people lose their temper, becoming angry and expressing angry emotions.
The consequences of violence often leave unforgiveness and a desire for revenge in the soul; angry emotions are expressed in wishing everything negative for the offender. The desire to satisfy one’s desires and the lack of opportunities to carry out one’s plans often lead to negativism, irritation and anger; anger finds its way out in blaming everyone.
Important! The Bible clearly says that a person will be under a curse if he trusts in another person rather than in God. (Jeremiah 17:5)
In the list of the seven deadly sins, envy comes before sin, often being the cause of irritation. The love of money also lurks nearby.
An angry response born of envy often leads to negative consequences. Out of envy, Cain killed his brother Abel. Because of the desire to occupy one or another higher position, people are capable of meanness, slander, and are angry because of their own inadequacy. The Lord sees all our abilities and talents, and it is His will to grant a promotion or promotion to a more significant role in life.
Anger is one of the seven most destructive passions
The inability to say “No,” born of self-doubt, gives rise to fear and a pressing sense of problems, leading to internal protest and self-destruction. Lack of self-control and respect for the world around us are constant companions of an angry person, always dissatisfied with everything.
Trainings cannot change the soul
– Suppose we have a person in front of us who in childhood suffered many trials, worries, and witnessed parental quarrels. And so he has both anger and irritation - both as a reaction and as a deepest internal state. Can this be fixed?
- Not myself. These are very deep internal things that cannot be corrected by just any psychotherapy. You see, a deep conflict can begin very early in childhood, or maybe in adolescence.
If a person has attacks of anger because he is angry by nature, then he will cope because he lives in harmony with himself. A psychologist can help here.
But if a person has a split inside, that is, he is angry not by nature, by nature, but due to the reasons that we talked about above, and, for example, he is forced to assert himself all the time if he is irritated by people who think differently, like him, then this is a signal that you need to contact a specialist who will help you work through internal conflicts. You may know where the knot of problems arose and began, but the person himself is rarely able to understand the content of the internal conflict.
From the experience of my psychological practice, I can say that if a person has been wounded since childhood, then he does not have full responsibility for his sin.
He knows that he is not entirely to blame for his condition and course of action. That the world in which he grows up and which has become dangerous for him is largely to blame. Others are to blame for making him this way. “We are all to blame for each other” by Dostoevsky - this is exactly what it’s about.
I don't think self-control in anger is possible. The fact is that with the help of cognitive techniques, “training,” you can relieve the severity of public reactions, learn to restrain yourself so as not to quarrel with comrades, colleagues, and loved ones and successfully develop your career. But this is impossible in relation to the soul.
It's not a matter of simply holding back your anger. A person should live naturally: if you are indignant - be indignant, if you are indignant - be indignant, but if you feel that you are arrogant, overly passionate, then calm down, calm down.
You may scare someone; they won’t believe you or your reactions. You are already moving from receiving to rejecting, which means you are already angry and sinning.
The main advice is always and in everything: watch yourself, slow down and stop if you see that you are skidding. Although it is paradoxical, it is true: self-control is possible for the sake of relationships with people dear to you, for the sake of others, but no one will restrain themselves for their own sake.
